by Ian Stewart
That hurt. Charity hit back. "You know the real reason why you won't cooperate with the authorities?"
Prudence had a ready answer. "I'm asserting my fundamental human right to free choice."
"Quite the reverse. You're asserting your fundamental human right to let your emotions rule your head. It's Dunsmoore, isn't it?"
"I don't see what that jumped-up little prick has to—"
"See? Point proved. We both know how he cheated you . . . and you can't ever let it go, can you? Even though humanity hangs in the balance, you just can't bring yourself to offer him the slightest shred of assistance, can you? No way, not a chance. Pru, that's false pride! You're cutting off your nose to—"
"—make myself smell worse." Of course. Charity had nailed her dead center, but there wasn't a chance in hell that she'd admit it. "Agreed, I don't believe Dunsmoore is the right man for the job—in fact, I don't believe Dunsmoore is the right man for any job outside the sewers. But he's in charge and if I can do anything constructive to help him I will. I just don't believe that handing over more wheelers can possibly be of any use." And there was another reason, too, one that homebody Charity would never understand . . . The wheelers were out there. Pru wanted them. She wanted them all. And she wanted proper recognition for discovering them. Sir Charles had managed to muddy the waters, again. By the time she'd proved the wheelers were genuine, the key moment had passed: the media were already bored. Then, when the comet loomed and they woke up, guess who grabbed most of the media coverage?
Next time, though, she'd be ready
She picked up her bags, slinging them randomly about her person. "Do you understand, Charity? Not pride, not obstinacy—-just a rational assessment of where I stand."
Charity gave her a look of utter contempt. "Prudence, I know full well where you stand."
"Oh?"
"You stand condemned."
Afterward, she wished she'd had the foresight not to say that. They must have heard the door slamming in Dar es Salaam.
Bailey Bamum wasn't sure he fancied Jupiter. Mars, yeah, that had sounded kind of fun, filming the desert where thoats might have roamed, reconstructing them with computer graphics. But Mars was relatively close. Jupiter was two years for a single trip, four for a return ticket.
When Angle had commissioned them to film her collection, he hadn't realized that it would require outside-broadcast shots of the original home of the wheelers. He should have guessed. Ruthie Bowser would have smelled a rat straightaway.
Cashew, in contrast, was ecstatic. Over the moon, so to speak. She'd always wanted to travel.
Jonas had wavered. He liked home comforts. Then Prudence had taken him off somewhere for a long chat—a very long chat. Jonas had come back somewhat dazed, but full of newfound enthusiasm for getting them all cooped up in a tin can for years on end. Angle settled the matter by reminding them of some clauses in their contract.
He wondered why Prudence was so eager for them to come along, anyway. Prudence preferred not to reveal the real reason, because it was selfish. The best way to gain media attention was to lug your own tame media around with you. This time, Charlie, you're not going to steal my thunder
The army ants had left!
For as long as Binshaba could remember they had trailed through the Village, always following much the same path, causing minor but infuriating nuisance, and impossible to eradicate.
The women of the Village discussed this remarkable event. The army ants had been a fixture. The Villagers had long ago given up trying to get rid of them.
One of the women was bursting to offer her own pet theory. It had been the third anniversary of the boy's arrival among them— an auspicious day. Something miraculous was only to be expected. "Binshaba: it was your child. He did this thing."
"Moses?"
"Z saw him. Hours every day, sitting next to the ant trail."
Binshaba laughed. "Reading the ant trails? That means nothing, Kashina, I saw that myself. He enjoys watching animals, even insects. That's all."
The woman persisted. She knew what she had seen. "Yesterday I saw the boy carrying a dead rat. Today, the trail of army ants has vanished, leaving only marks in the ground."
If this idea spreads, it could he dangerous. Binshaba gave the other woman a sharp glance. "Kashina, I hope you are not as credulous as the menfolk, trying to tell me that Moses is a sorcerer."
This was exactly what Kashina had been thinking, but she had no wish to face Binshaba's scorn. "Of course not! But ... he studied the army ants for many days, and then he had a rat, and now they are gone. I am convinced he must be responsible."
Binshaba felt a shiver run up her spine. It was true. She'd noticed long ago that Moses had an uncanny ability to empathize with the animal kingdom. But now it seemed that his abilities extended even to ants. Moses had a very strange mind ... At times it seemed almost alien.
"Perhaps you are right, Kashina. I will ask Moses."
How had he managed it? He was an Outsider, and that presumably explained his strange powers. The women of the Village had never seen another Outsider, and they weren't supposed to know that Moses was one, or that there was an Outside for him to have come from. But of course they did, and the mothers talked to their children and wove strange tales for them when their fathers weren't within earshot. Tales of a fabulous world with huts the size of mountains and animals made of tin, a world where paintings moved and their colors shone like the moon. And the strangeness of the tales rubbed off on Moses. Sorcerer or not, everyone in the Village recognized that the boy was in possession of a wondrous talent.
They called him Speaker-to-Animals.
13
The Village. 2219
Carlesson moved between the boulders like a silent shadow. He was tougher now, all sinew and muscle and not an ounce of spare fat. He was also a lot less naive and a lot meaner.
He glanced down at his 'node. Yes, this was leopard country, all right—there were eleven of them within thirty miles, and a female with cubs within two. It was one of the less desirable side effects of the Diversity Police's obsessive, though not always effective, tracking of the world's wild animals—by hacking into their computer systems, the Hunters could use the DiPol's own information to pick their targets.
Not only that—it was close to the Village, where Carlesson believed that the black child was to be found. This was recent intelligence, obtained by accident. Carlesson had a strong interest in Moses' future. He intended to make sure that the boy didn't have one.
Xi Ming-Kuo had made it amply clear to Carlesson that sparing Moses' life had been a mistake. For five years he had been given the most dangerous and unpleasant assignments. As Xi had anticipated, Carlesson had possessed the strength of character, the sheer stubborn bloodymindedness, not only to survive them, but to thrive. Carlesson only found out why he had been treated so harshly when Xi congratulated him on his survival, spelled out in a few curt sentences why that particular training regimen had been necessary, and asked him what he would do with the child if he ever encountered him again.
Carlesson made a throat-slitting gesture. He shook with barely concealed fury. Five years of misery! Five years of the worst assignments, the menial tasks, the grunt work . . . All because of a stupid fucking kid who happened to he in the wrong place at the right time!
He wouldn't make the same mistake twice.
Xi was satisfied. Carlesson had learned a difficult lesson and was all the stronger for his ordeal.
Meanwhile, the matter of the black child had become quite unsatisfactory. For reasons Xi could not begin to fathom, fate had allowed the child to live. It was presumably Bad Luck, and the simplest way to deal with it was to give fate a helping hand and turn his misfortune into Good Luck. A few prayers and suitable distributions of cash would square his account with the traditional gods—or, more importantly, with those who claimed to represent them. It would be impolitic to attract the wrath of the priesthood. But that was mere detail, and routine.
Xi knew that the boy was in the hands of his enemy Deng Po-zhou. He lost much sleep imagining how possession of the child might be used to bring about his own downfall. He spent a fortune trying to track down the child's whereabouts, to no effect. One day, he knew he would discover the boy's hiding place. He turned his attention to grooming Carlesson as an assassin. Having set the pieces in motion, Xi waited for the endgame to begin.
Back in favor now, the Hunter was granted a rare privilege: freedom to operate in any region of the globe, all travel expenses paid without question, the best equipment money could buy. He could choose his own assignments. It was also made clear that these privileges would continue only as long as the Hunter achieved sufficiently impressive results.
Carlesson did. He was the star of the whole operation. His skills became legendary among the Hunters . . . often much embellished in the telling. His kills poured money into Xi Ming-Kuos coffers. If a client required an animal, however obscure and well protected, Carlesson would provide it. He eluded heavy guards and stole rare animals from under their protectors' noses. He was given training in unarmed and armed combat and was encouraged to use it. Within one heady period of two months, four members of the Diversity Police died at his hands in separate operations, and on each occasion he secured great prizes for Xis growing chain of medicine shops.
He netted himself big cash bonuses, too, and his reputation soared.
He learned new ways to kill.
Then, one night, he was sitting in a bar in Louang Namtha on the Laotian side of the China/Laos border, waiting for various financially lubricated backs to be turned so that he could cross safely into Free China. A scruffy little Chinese guy had stormed in, shouting curses about barbarians ruining his life. Carlesson had a fondness for that particular bar, and purely to ensure peace and quiet he'd bought the man a drink and tried to calm him down. Over the next half hour he was rewarded with big chunks of the man's life history, and Carlesson gradually came to realize that Pung, as he was called, had been some minor cog in the White Dragons and had been exiled from China by his gang leader. The gang had taken all his identity papers, spirited him across the border, and abandoned him. At that point Carlesson developed a new agenda, declared himself Pung's lifelong buddy, and insisted on treating him to drinks for the rest of the evening. Carlesson privately considered Pung lucky to be alive, but outwardly he was sympathetic to the man's rantings. He never did find out how the barbarians had ruined Pung's life, but he did get around to asking whether the man had ever been out of Free China before.
"Sort of."
"Either you have or you haven't."
"Only by 'giro. Night."
"This was recently, of course."
"No. Six, maybe seven year! Never saw thing. Never put foot on barbarian soil."
Carlesson dug. "Sounds pretty stupid to me. Your boss must have been weird."
Pung's by now rather mixed loyalty to the White Dragons won out through the alcoholic haze. "No, boss smart] Special mission. One passenger, black kid— he weird."
Carlesson chose his next words with care. "Of course, your boss didn't tell you where you were taking the weird kid. No, he wouldn't have trusted—"
Pung was incensed. "Yes! Yes! Well, he no tell, but I ask pilot. Africa. Africa! Special place, nobody can go. Not even barbarian."
Carlesson bought Pung more drinks, insisted on finding him somewhere for the night, and did—on the canal bed with his throat slit and a heavy chain wrapped around his waist. Having at last found out where Moses was, the Hunter wasn't taking any silly risks. He knew he should report the discovery to Xi, but it would be much more effective to wait until he could tell him that the boy was dead.
Carlesson had just two objectives: bring back a leopard, kill Moses. His mistake was trying to carry them out in that order.
It was young Kimu who found the Hunter's tracks. They were unusual, for Carlesson wore boots. A Witch! The excited girl ran back to the Village, and soon Moses got to hear of the discovery. Not a Witch — an Outsider! Soon all the children knew.
Moses and two of the older boys slipped out of the Village early the next morning and made an even more unnerving discovery. They found confused leopard tracks and clear traces of blood. Moses read the meaning of the signs immediately and without effort: "The Outsider has killed B'wulu and her cubs."
"Did he use the weapon that we are not supposed to know about?" asked Ruwanga, the eldest of the three.
"No, I have seen these Outsiders kill before," said Moses, and his fists clenched so hard that he dug his fingernails deep into his palms, drawing blood. "They use only the knife and the crossbow They are Hunters, and they are our enemies. They wrench our animals from their proper place in the world.
"The Hunters are an abomination."
"What shall we do?" cried Ruwanga, eyes wide.
"We shall purge the abomination from the face of the world."
With due caution, Carlesson made his way toward the Village. If he could get up one of the nearby slopes, he would be able to observe the daily movements of the people, and soon he would locate the child. Then—
A twig broke behind him. He turned.
A boy. Something in the child's manner told him it was the boy
Children's heads poked over the rocks—six, seven ... a dozen. Witnesses. It didn't matter. This time he would make no mistake. He would kill them all. First, though, the boy.
The other children stayed back. The boy walked toward him. "I am Moses. I have come for you."
Carlesson laughed. It was the boy This was all too easy. The hoy had come for him.' Such arrogance! He put down his bow, unsheathed his knife, and set it on a rock. Bare hands would be far more satisfying—to feel the crunch of bone, the yielding flesh, the pain and the horror of the realization . . .
"Five years you cost me," he snarled. "Five fucking years of my life! You have come for me?"
"Think again, little boy!"
Moses had not recognized the Hunter until that moment, for his face had changed considerably, but the inference was not lost on him. He had forgotten most of his childhood at Gooma, but never this. "You are the one who killed Zemby and Mbawa."
"The cheetahs? Were they yours? Yeah—I killed them, all right. Two dead furry bodies—you remember?"
Moses wiped away a tear. Dear lord, Carlesson thought, this is going to he so easy! "And now I'm going to kill you, little boy Put right the mistake I made the first time we met!"
Moses seemed unafraid. "You talk a lot," he said.
"Yes, and by—" The kid was right. He did talk a lot. Too much. Time to get it over with. Carlesson decided that he would start by breaking both the boy's legs, then move on to his arms, and after that—well, there were quite a lot of combat moves he needed to practice. He held his hands out, fingers clenched, ignoring all of his training because it was obvious he wouldn't need it. This was just a kid, for god's sake! He laughed again, and closed in on Moses until the child was almost within reach . . .
Moses gave a signal. A hail of rocks converged on the Hunter. He dodged them, grinning. Stupid kids couldn't even throw straight. For a moment, though, he took his eyes off Moses. As soon as he did so, the boy spun in a blur of movement. His arms extended for balance, he kicked high and fast with his right heel, just as Snowflake had taught him. The heel hit Carlesson at the base of his nose. So great was the force that a sliver of sharp bone was detached from his skull. Moses' aim was perfect: the sliver became the tip of a bone spear, penetrating the thin, perforated regions of the skull where the cartilage of the nose normally rested . . .
The spear thrust deep into the Hunter's unprotected brain.
Within an instant, Carlesson was dead. He didn't even have time to anticipate the move. He certainly didn't have time to deduce that someone had taught Moses the rudiments of gongfu. Or that the rock barrage was a classic street-child tactic.
Moses looked down at his dead adversary. He knew he could have killed him without the distraction of the ro
cks—but why take the risk? He had thrown the tea and the cup. Silent Snowflake would have applauded. His method may not have been particularly elegant, but it was very effective.
They left the dead Hunter for scavengers. Nobody else from the Village was remotely likely to pass that way and nobody from Outside was permitted to, so the children saw little reason to waste time hiding the body Anyway the hyenas would just haul it out again.
Over the next few days Moses occasionally stopped what he was doing to glance at the sky in the direction of the ravine. When the stream of arriving vultures became a stream of departing ones, and only the usual few, circling high above, remained, he knew it was time to go back. Alone.
He hoped that what he wanted was still there to be found . . .
In the early hours of the morning, while it was still dark, Moses sneaked out of the hut where he slept and made his way back to the ravine by the light of the stars. He had no fear of any animals that he might encounter, confident that he would be able to read their moods and calm any aggression. But B'wulu's mate, who normally haunted those parts, was nowhere to be seen, and what few snakes he chanced upon were small and timid, slithering away into the rocks and bushes.
The hyenas had gone—to where the pickings were now better. To judge by their scuffled tracks, there had been plenty of them around a few nights earlier.
He scrambled down the slope of the ravine, bare feet firm against the treacherous, gritty earth, triggering miniature landslides but nothing worse.
Most of the Hunter was gone. Hyenas and vultures had stripped the corpse of its flesh and internal organs. The softer bones had been eaten, too. The rest of the skeleton had been scattered over a sizable patch of ground, and for more than an hour Moses picked over the remains by the light of the stars, hoping to find what he coveted.
He found what was left of one leg in a depression in the rocks, smothered in hyena droppings; the other was underneath a thombush. The skull had rolled under the base of a tree and was probably home to scorpions.